Hello and thank you for visiting AikiWeb, the
world's most active online Aikido community! This site is home to
over 22,000 aikido practitioners from around the world and covers a
wide range of aikido topics including techniques, philosophy, history,
humor, beginner issues, the marketplace, and more.

If you wish to join in the discussions or use the other advanced
features available, you will need to register first. Registration is
absolutely free and takes only a few minutes to complete so sign up today!

The ancient texts and various writings, commentary and codifications about internal strength start out with the idea of Heaven as a source of power, the Earth as a source of power, and many having his own ability and "qi" with which to utilize and combine the qi of Heaven and the Qi of Earth. The "Superior Man" (as the classics say) will use the power of Earth and Heaven to provide as much of his needs and strength as possible. I.e, the "superior man" doesn't use brute strength, he uses qi in its varying format.

The Qi of Earth provides the support of the ground for us to use in place of strength and it provides the weight of an object (downweight) to do work that requires down forces. Said slighty differently, the earth provides forces upward from the surface and it provides forces downward due to weight. Both of these functions indicate that generally speaking, the Qi of Earth is mostly a description of Gravity. In a number of both Chinese and Japanese martial-arts styles, you'll see this reference to Gravity (Kuroda Tetsuzan hands out a flier to beginning students describing the importance of "gravity").

Up and Down, Open and Close, Yin-Yang, etc., are all dichotomies explaining the basic body's function in relation to Gravity. To "Open" is to expand and inhale, with the joints naturally winding openward... the strength of the solidity of the ground is expanded upward and outward; To "Close" is to exhale while the body sink and the joints wind inward... the
...More

In an effort to help create a baseline of understanding about qi/ki and jin/kokyu in Asian martial-arts, I tried my hand at very simply writing the baselines. The topic could be expanded tremendously, but I was trying to lay out some (not all) of the basic elements so that people can get a foot in the door. The below represents a series of posts (each from its own thread); when I wrote them I indicated that it was OK to copy these basic posts from the QiJin forum and put them in other places if the posts would provide help in setting a baseline of sorts.

Just as there were great reactions and outrage in the earlier days about something as simple as "groundpath", I expect some of these posts will be puzzling, too, but ultimately they'll be understood a fairly basic and obvious comments. If you re-post these comments, please attribute to the QiJin Forum.

One of the things I've been changing in recent times at workshops (and on the forum) is the perspective of Jin as a Balance Skill, getting somewhat away from the vector perspective. I think people can grasp the balance-skill concept perhaps a little more quickly than all the steps that become confusing in the aggregate.

Here's a quick video that Price and I made today and which I want to use to illustrate the Balance Skill idea. I also want to point out the "flexibl
...More